Review - Apur Pachali

Rarely do we come across a film which lives up to all its predictability, and then we are swept off by it. Yet Apur PNachali manages it without any effort at all.

After watching the film, I was once more reading the review of ‘The Apu Trilogy’ by Roger Ebert, just to recapitulate what Pather PNachali meant to the world of cinema when it first came out. We have celebrated and marvelled at the movie for a long time now, but I guess no one from our generation could truly understand what it was to the audience, when they saw it the very first time. Ebert says that half the people in the audience could not even imagine something like that could be achieved with the medium called cinema. And hence, they could not completely understand what was happening on the screen. The brutal simplicity, the searing sensitivity and the enthralling poetry of the film introduced the mass to the enigma called Satyajit Ray, which had arrived to claim its throne in the Hall of fame of cinema.

Now, this was from an audience who didn’t understand Bengali, let alone read the original text. Their major mode of communication with the film was through the music composed by another maestro, and the eyes of the original quintessential dreamer of Bengali literature – the little Apu.

After such a long time, there is no point discussing the impact of Ray’s casting in his films, especially for the child actors. But, I guess casting Subir Banerjee as Apu was in a league all by itself. The large curious eyes personified in an instant, all that Bibhutibhushan built through his immortal words.

And this is where Apur PNachali opens. When the movie was promoted I got the impression that it was about child actors who were cast in cult characters, but disappeared into oblivion later. It was expected to be a montage of how the film affected the actor’s life, travelling back and forth in time.

And the movie does exactly that, just with a master stroke. Only at the interval did I realize, I couldn’t even remember when the changeover happened. It was like the pleasant all-pervading sensation you get just as you are drifting off to sleep, and you’re never aware of exactly when the transition happens. Looking back, it appears to me that four things made this possible.

First, the quality of the footage used from Pather pachali. Owing to the long time the original tapes were stored under primitive conditions and the limited number of prints available, the restoration of the archived footages is remarkable. That is why, its very difficult to distinguish between the footage from Pather PNachali and Subir Banerjee’s youth (which is also shot in black and white) if you don’t watch closely. I must say, Mridul Baidya and Saswati Karmakar did a spectacular job as Art directors on this front.

Second, the editing. The editor does his best job if the audience doesn’t realize he was there, period. And in this film, Bodhaditya Banerjee is almost invisible. The smoothness with which he drifts from the archive footages to Subir Banerjee’s story, is something you would need to see to realize.

Third, the music. What Indradeep Dasgupta has done with the background score can be called nothing short of genius, simply because nothing short of genius would have worked with what he and Kaushik attempted here. The challenge was to preserve Ravi Shankar’s original background score for the archived footages since they have been entwined forever in our minds with those scenes, and compose a new score for the film, which has the same rich simplicity, use the same tone and instruments and yet is much more urban and suited to the time when Subir Banerjee grew up.

To simply say that they have come out of the challenge with amazing grace, is the greatest form of praise I can think of here. The song ‘Apur Paayer Chaap’, a beauty by itself, is not there in the movie. It is again a great decision, because any song in the background score of this film would have ruined the mood.

Fourth and most important, Kaushik Ganguly’s research. The three achievements mentioned above are no doubt examples of masterly execution of the respective crafts. However, without Kaushik Ganguly’s vision these would have been redundant. It is amazing, almost eerie, as to how similar Apu and Subir Banerjee’s life had been through most of the stages of their lives. It seems unreal when we see the dream transcend so smoothly to the reality of the dreamer. This gets all the more engrossing, because its very evident that Apu and Subir Banerjee are two very, very different persons. Due to this contrast, there are moments throughout the film when you half expect the ‘real Apu’ to react in a certain way, and Parambrata (young Subir Banerjee) jolts you back to reality. These moments are some of the greatest assets of the film.

Another wonderful insight the film offers is what Apu means to us. Though Apur Sangsar was actually the stepping stone for Soumitra Chattopadhyay among the golden greats, the first visual the name Apu inspires is still the close up of the face of Subir Banerjee peering from behind a pillar. Yet, he was not the only Apu. In fact, he was not selected for Aparajito because Ray didn’t feel he has evolved to quite the vision of Apu the director had in his mind. Our connection to Subir Banerjee as Apu ends there, and we move along. All that is left for us is the innocent face, the birthplace of a trilogy that became a cult. But, Apu doesn’t leave Subir Banerjee there. In fact, it never left him. The world forgot the actor, but the character did not. It has been haunting him all his life.

While on this point, there is another subtle beauty of the treatment I would like to mention. The normal expectation was, that the archive footages used for the montage would only be for the ones from Pather PNachali, with Subir Banerjee as Apu. But it was not!

The director has used archive footage for all the three ‘Apu’s in contrast to Subir’s life. And yet, they are woven so subtly in the film, that the expectation or the imagination never stumbles on the fact that this wasn’t what we expected. We just gradually sidle into the realization that no matter who played Apu, it never left Subir Banerjee, as probably Kaushik wanted.

The performances have all been very good. All the main characters have done a commendable job, although I felt the casting of Ardhendu Banerjee as modern Subir Banerjee was a little off as his features, especially his eyes do not exude the hint of Apu as I expected. Parno Mitra has created a very thorough and alive Ashima, bringing back Sharmila Tagore’s Aparna successfully. Param has lived up to the challenge of playing the counterpart of a cult and Gaurav as Arka effortlessly personifies the passion called Pather Pachali, that we all hold so close to our hearts.

There are a thousand more reasons to applaud this film, and I would have done that if Kaushik Ganguly was still an unappreciated great director as he had been before APG days. However, since now a lot of people truly understands his value, I would stop here to let them watch the movie and discover his magic once more.

All I shall say is Pather Pachali mesmerized us with the story of the Apu we all know.

And Apur Pachali does the the same, with the story of an Apu we never did.